Gandhi did not survive even six months after India gained independence. Yet no other Indian in the twentieth century has had the kind of impact on India’s destiny that he had. In more ways than one, Gandhi defined India’s political, social, cultural and moral imagination. In his last years, and certainly after his assassination on 30 January 1948, India set itself on a course which was different from Gandhi’s vision. Bernard Imhasly, anthropologist, journalist and writer, journeys from Imphal to Cyberabad and Bangalore, and from Champaran to Porbandar, looking at a new India keeping Gandhi’s ideas and values in mind. He finds a society where Gandhi is alive but his virulence is missing, a polity which worships him but easily forgets his guiding principles, and a morality which thrives on oppression rather than on the search for truth, a principle Gandhi held paramount. While many of his interlocutors decry Gandhi, there is a surprising number of people for whom he remains a yardstick of their life and work. Goodbye to Gandhi?: Travels in the New India examines how the choices that India made as an independent nation have shaped the country’s politics, its culture and its people. While India acquires a new-found confidence and optimism in its economic future, Bernard Imhasly, in his engaging travels through current-day India, listening for echoes of Gandhi’s voices, finds a cacophony of voice–alluring, exciting and sometimes exasperating.
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